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Sir David Attenborough and the giant dinosaur in Patagonia

Now we at Latin Odyssey love Sir David Attenborough as much as the next man but this time he has really outdone himself.

On the evening of Sunday 24th January he showed us how he helped uncover the biggest creature to have ever walked the earth.

At 6.30pm the Latin Odyssey team were all glued to the TV watching his latest programme – Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur. Set in Patagonia, Argentina it’s a truly awe inspiring story about a discovery of the largest animal to ever walk the Earth – a new species of the plant-eating titanosaur.

Source: Radio times

This dinosaur discovery sprang from a chance observation by an Argentinian farm labourer.

He was working on the dry, barren plains of Patagonia and he spotted something very unusual. There was a large bone sticking out of the ground. The bone was 2.4m long – that’s very big, even by dinosaur standards. As you can imagine the paleontologists all around the world became very excited – as did everyone else, including us!

The more the investigation team dug, the more bones they found, dozens of them, belonging to a titanosaurus that lived 100m years ago.

Some geeky stats for you. The 130ft-long dinosaur was 65ft tall and weighed 77 tons. And the big thing is that until its discovery, it was thought that the world’s largest dinosaur was the Argentinosaurus, which was discovered about 25 years ago. So this one was bigger and that’s why its discovery has stunned the science community and sent dozens of experts racing to this remote part of the Patagonian desert.

If this programme inspires you to find out more about Patagonia as a holiday destination take a look here at what you can expect and suggestions for where to stay